The Witness for the Defence is not a novel in which one has to work very hard to get at its overarching theme. In fact, that theme is presented more along the lines of a moral. And that moral is not buried beneath abstraction, but put right out there for all to learn in an explicit quote by one of its characters:
"People get what they want if they want it enough, but they can't control the price they have to pay.”
Of course, there is another theme at work that also works quite well as the moral foundation of the twists and turns of the narrative trek though its fairly standard crime thriller template. It is a moral that is neither new nor original, but certainly does the trick: “What a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive.”
Anyone familiar with some of the less famous adventures of Sherlock Holmes will find themselves in comfortable territory in this novel. It features true love that is not consummated leading to a bad marriage to a violent brute serving queen and country in India who founds upon on the unforgiving end of a bullet from a rifle. The lost love is called upon to do a little duty of his own by stepping back into the life of his lost love in order to protect her honor and reputation for, as expected, she is the suspected as possessing the finger which pulled the trigger of that rifle which, it just so happens, was also known to be her possession.
Sherlock Holmes’ adventure “The Abbey Grange” appeared about a decade before this novel and while there is nothing directly similar about the plot there is—as Sherlock might say—“something about it.” Something in The Witness for the Defence feels strange familiar if one has read (or seen the brilliant adaptation made with Jeremy Brett at the very peak of his considerable game as Holmes). What that “something” is cannot really be clarified because the two stories are so remarkably different while at the same time covering similar grounds. What that “something” is, however, likely also points to why the Sherlock story ends with the reader happy and content even though Sherlock has violated the law by allowing the killer to go free whereas the most common complaint about Mason’s tale is that it leaves something of a bitter aftertaste.
That bitter aftertaste left when one puts this book down is centered upon about the only thing missing from this story that almost makes one dizzy from its sudden veers in direction. The woman at the heart of the mystery is presented, ultimately, as an almost complete and total enigma. She starts out one way before taking a sharp left turn to seem something altogether different and by the end the reader really isn’t entirely sure where she stands. This would be fine and even admirable, but the really bitter part of the aftertaste is not centered upon her, but rather the witness for the defence who let her get away.
His selfish devotion to his career above love is the mechanism which drives the young lady directly into the arms of her military brute of a husband. The foul flavoring of this tale is directly the opposite of the reason why Sherlock is willing to let the unquestionable guilty party involved in the nasty incident at Abbey Grange walk away from the long arm of the law: “this fellow rings true every time, Watson.” Well, the witness for the defence—one Henry Thresk—ironically fails to ring true even though he remains steadfastly more in character than the girl he sends away to her potential doom.
The reader may be just as likely to arrive at the abrupt and less than satisfying conclusion to the novel with the imperative to place the lion’s share of the blame for events going south on Stella as they are to hang that albatross around Thresk’s neck. Neither conclusion makes either character any more likable.
